About

This blog began as just of a seed of an idea that followed a discovery.

In the summer of 2019, my family and I were going through boxes of my grandma’s papers after she passed away. As an aside, let me say, unfortunately I seem to have inherited her organization. Which is to say, there wasn’t much organization to speak of.

There was one particular box, dusty from years in the garage like all the others, filled with newspaper clippings, pamphlet cookbooks, family photos, informational documents about how to learn ESP, you name it.

As we sifted through these layers of the past, we pulled out something that immediately struck us as significant. It was an old, crumbling composition book labeled “Receipts March 1895.”

We opened it up to find page after page of handwritten recipes. The author that held the pen is– and I assume, will always be– a mystery. There is no name signed within the pages, though there are mentions of acquaintances’ recipe contributions (for example: “Fruit Cake by Measure — Mrs. Hartford’s Receipt”).

However, we can make an educated guess. Most of the old family documents in my grandma’s possession were from her husband’s family. He was over 20 years her senior, born near the turn of the century. It’s known that his mother was an avid cook. So we’re assuming that this cookbook belonged to my great grandmother Cora.

The notebook certainly shows its age. The paper is stained, the ink faded in places, and the brittle pages have begun to crumble. It was immediately apparent that this book would not be able to survive multiple re-readings, so I took a picture of every page. They’re not all great pictures — some of them have my shadow looming over them — but as long as the recipes are clear they’re good enough.

Looking through the recipes, many of them were for things I hadn’t heard of before, or included certain quirks like “butter the size of an egg,” “sweet milk,” or cooking in a “slow oven.”

I thought it might be fun to cook my way through it, a bit like Julie and Julia. But I couldn’t stop there. The world is full of forgotten recipes, whether they’re from the Great Depression, the colonial era of the US…the possibilities aren’t necessarily endless, what with inconsistent record keeping and all, but they’re certainly quite vast.

So I’ve begun this journey down a bit of a strange rabbit hole, reveling in the uncertainty of vague recipes for dishes I don’t always understand.

I hope you’ll join me and enjoy the ride.

See you around the blog!

-Kelly